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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

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Chapter 2: All You Ever Need to Know About Enos “Stainy” Taney


Chapter 2:


All You Ever Need to Know About Enos “Stainy” Taney


Anyway, I don’t believe that I have to explain to anybody how Enos Taney came to have the nickname “Stainy.” It was a natural thing. You cannot say “Enos Taney” without hearing “Stainy.” Try it. You can’t do it. What I wonder, and I know some of you are wondering too, did his parents not hear that as well? They basically said, as they looked down on their newborn child wrapped in a white hospital towel with his little smushed baby face crying salt-free baby tears, “Let’s stick him forever with the nickname ‘Stainy’.” Well, the moniker stuck, and the parents who maybe weren’t too smart turned out to be right in the end. Enos Taney was never involved in anything that he didn’t dirty up. He left a grimy yellowish-brown stain on everything that he ever came in contact with like shart-tracks in tighty whiteys, and I have to admit, to my shame, that it includes me. Yeah, you don’t take more shit than spending three years in prison for a guy who you barely know. Whatcha gonna do?

You see, Stainy was a Stone County boy like me, and he went to Mountain View High School like me, but he was six years ahead of me in school, so he was well outside the “know zone.” The “know zone” is the two years ahead of you and the two years behind you in school. You know your classmates, you know three quarters of the people in the grades a year ahead of you and a year behind you, you know half of the people two years either way, but unless you have brothers or sisters in the other age groups and classes, you hardly know anyone outside of the “know zone.” Stainy was well outside of my “know zone.” In fact, I’m not sure who his parents were or if he had any siblings. I think he lived with ol’ Sam Taney who had a lawn mower and small engine repair shop down by Flatwoods, but Sam and his wife were old people in my recollection, so they might have been his grandparents, and I think they both died when I was still a small child. I suppose if Stainy’s folks were that old and he had no siblings that could explain a lot about how he turned out so rotten, but I don’t know about those facts and details. I don’t know much about Stainy’s life in Stone County, so I’ll not say any more on that.

Anyhow, I met Stainy at the party that I mentioned in the last chapter. Here is how I came to be at that party. I was working a construction job in Little Rock with a buddy of mine named Joey Bob Mitchum. Joey Bob liked to smoke pot during every break that we took during the day, so at nine, noon, and three he would go hang out with the painters and electricians and disappear into a corner veiled in thick, skunky smoke. If you know painters the way I do, you know they did much more than simply puff on marijuana cigarettes. They snorted cocaine, they dropped acid, and whatever they could get their hands on, they smoked, snorted, dropped, or shot up. Obtaining the heavier drugs used by the other building contractors on the construction site became like an obsession to Joey Bob even though I had never known him to use harder drugs before, and I had known him since we were little kids. Anyway, finally, after much begging them for information and convincing them of his ability to maintain confidentiality, Joey Bob got the painters to hook him up with their drug supplier, and this dealer agreed to meet Joey Bob at a party in Greenbrier at some address long since forgotten. Yep! You guessed it. That supplier of hard drugs was none other than Enos Taney.

Well, so Joey Bob and I load up the next Saturday evening and head out to a keg party at a place we have never been to hang out with people that we never did know. We had only gotten to the party and just opened the doors of my truck when Stainy comes across the yard and guides us off to a corner of the house in some bushes to make the deal before we go in to the party instead of later after we’ve been drinking. When he finds out through the small talk we were making that we were fellow Stone Countyians, Stainy is tickled to death. I think he even gave Joey Bob a couple of extra pills of something. Though his drug dealings were with Joey Bob, he sort of took to me for some reason, and the whole night he treated me like we were old buddies. I didn’t do drugs or even smoke marijuana if I could keep from it back then, but I did drink hard, and that night there was plenty of cutting up, drunken singing, and legless vow-making that us hill folk and former Yellow Jackets should stick together through thick-and-thin, and that is how, as the revels continued until the sun lit up the eastern sky, Joey Bob and me and a couple other guys, who I think were from Stone County as well, ended up in Stainy’s Blazer a going to a drug deal at six o’clock in the morning. It was my first experience with trafficking drugs, but it was only one of many times that I provided protection, purposely or inadvertently, for Stainy’s personal effects.

Anyway, I feel like a fox that’s leading hounds around in a circle to cover his tracks or maybe an ass that’s treading circles turning a sorghum mill. I keep moving with this story, but I always end up back at the same spot. Whatcha gonna do? I think I’ll describe Stainy.

Hmm…Stainy is probably the most indescribable person I can think of. He was a bit on the short side, maybe 5’2” or so. I haven’t seen him in twenty years or more. He was not thin or fat, not athletic nor paunchy, just an average Joe. It would be hard to point him out in a crowd. He dressed in pocket t-shirts that can be bought three in a package at Walmart, and, now that I think back on it, the shirts tended to be gray, black, or white. Most seemed gray even if they had been white. They were all he ever wore in my presence. Oh! And also he kept a pack of name brand cigarettes in the relatively useless pocket of those t-shirts. His favorite brand was packaged in a white wrapper with a blue target on the front, and the blue target had a red center. I can’t recall the name of the brand, but it wasn’t Target. Besides the pocket t-shirts, he wore blue jeans of no particular brand that looked like they needed washing and laceless brown work boots, kind of like cowboy boots but with rounded toes. I’m pretty sure about that. He had long stringy, shoulder-length hair that fell down in his face when he learned forward and that seemed like it needed washing most of the time. He had brown eyes and a scraggly half-grown mustache. I reckon he struggled to grow facial hair, but he always seemed to be trying. That is about all that I can say about his appearance. I suspect that his looking like anybody or nobody at the same time helped him in his business. It’s hard to pay much attention to someone you can’t recall. But, besides being nondescript, everything about him and on him was tinged with dirt or a film that needed to be wiped away. Stainy always wanted a good washing.

Speaking of cleaning up, in twenty some odd years of doing business together, I only ever went to Stainy’s house three or four times. It was in a nice middle class neighborhood in the suburbs of Conway, AR. It could have been a classy place. The house was a large brown brick trimmed with blue siding. It had a two car garage with wide, white doors that were always closed because it was so full of junk that nobody parked in it. I say it could have been a nice place, but it wasn’t. His yard looked like a place where the owners had moved away six months ago because they couldn’t make the payments. The grass in both the front and back yards was knee-deep, and some tufts of tall, stalky weeds were head high. The whole quarter acre of ground was hemmed in with a shiny six-foot high chain link fence with several NO TRESPASSING signs fastened to it with metal wires. In this fence, two pit bulls roamed like bumbling, laughing sentinels. One of them always carried a popped soccer ball in his/her mouth. I couldn’t tell you the sex of either dog nor what either one looked like because the grass was up to their backs, and they slithered around in it mostly hidden by the weeds. Besides that, since the dogfight at the Pour Off, I have not been able to hold a gaze on a dog without feeling guilty, so I just don’t look at them. Anyway, their shit-spot must have been right by the front door because I distinctly recall having to hold my breath every time I walked into the house to get past it. It was rank. Bad memory! Huh…Let’s see. What else? I’m pretty sure there was a John Deere riding lawnmower sitting inside the fence with Johnson grass growing up through the mowing deck and steering wheel, but my memory might of added that detail later on. Whatever was truly out there, I can tell you for damned sure that I was not going to wander around in that yard to find it. Hell, I’d a never even opened the gate.

No, sir, when I was at Stainy’s, I walked in the front door, stepped briskly through a foyer area with no closet or coat rack, and went into a big dining room with ornate ceiling and floor trim and a red and gold wallpaper covered with flying cherubs and fat naked women who all seemed to be floating about. The room could have been straight out of a Victorian castle. It also had a chandelier-like light fixture with only two or three dim bulbs working centered over a large heavy oak dining table which was where Stainy held his court. The table had a big yellow glass ashtray sitting right in front of Stainy’s favorite chair on the end away from a nook window. Table sitters seemed to gather around that yellow ashtray. It always seemed to be filled with butts and ashes to the same level, and I wondered about that because wouldn’t somebody have to empty the ashtray from time-to-time for it to stay at the same filled level all the time? The same thing with the beer cans and liquor bottles. Identical half empty cans and bottles seemed to be sitting there every time I was there, but I never saw anybody drink out of a bottle, can, glass, or nothing. One time, there was a small square mirror with white lines of powder on it, sitting in front of Stainy and a little to his right, probably lines of cocaine, but I don’t know that. I sat talking to Stainy on his left side for over an hour that day, and nobody ever touched any of it.

Speaking of nobody…I never went to Stainy’s when there wasn’t already two or three people sitting around the table. They usually were smoking cigarettes and sometimes marijuana. They sat in a horseshoe shape near Stainy at the small round end. Not everybody faced Stainy, but nobody ever sat with his back toward the nook window, ever. I have my suspicions as to why, but like you, I would only be assuming. Most of the time, table sitters were looking through an arched opening opposite the foyer at a huge TV that hung on the wall on the opposite side of what appeared to be a very large living room. I never went in it. I only saw what could be seen of it through the arch from the foyer side of the table. Next to the TV and somehow hanging on the wall was a large fish tank that glowed blue and was filled with fish whose brilliant colors I could see from the table-distance, but I never went close to it, so I can’t tell you about the fish. The TV, however, I can tell you about. It was always on the Music Video Channel that some of you will remember as MTV and will remember did play music videos twenty-four hours a day. Conversations would stop when Legs by ZZ Top came on or Eric Clapton’s It’s in the Way That You Use It from The Color of Money. When favorite songs would come on, Stainy would take the remote that always sat by the yellow glass ashtray and turn the music up so that you could feel the floor and table vibrating in your feet and hands. Yep, if you were talking business and the right video came on, business had to stop, and everyone looked at the TV. Those who were on the living room side of the table had to turn their chairs to get a better view. Stainy would turn more toward the TV also and freeze as if he were in a trance until the video ended. Then, he would laugh his little annoying laugh and pick right back up in the conversation where he had stopped like the four-minute pause hadn’t happened at all.

Holy cow! I almost forgot about the most identifiable trait of Enos Taney, one that anybody who ever knew him could tell you about instantly, his extremely irritating laugh. I am going to need some help here because I don’t know how to write it out. You will have to think about this one closely as I try to describe it. Remember Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard and how he would laugh “Ku! Ku! Ku!” like a mixture of a cough and a giggle? If you can’t recall it, look it up on YouTube. Now, take that and cross it with the “He! He! He! He!” of Beavis from the Beavis and Butthead Show. Again, you can look it up on YouTube if need be. And, there you have it. Stainy punctuated nearly every spoken thought or completed action with “Ke! Ke! Ke! Ke!” Remember it has to shake your chest, throat, and shoulders like a joint-puff cough.

Okay, back to Stainy’s house…well…not much more I’ve got to say. I should mention two weird things that are more about the people at his house than the house itself. Every time I was there, a kid wandered through the dining room at least once with no clothes on except for what appeared to be a heavily loaded diaper, and I don’t mean loaded with bling. I have no idea if the child was a boy or a girl as there was no clothing color or hairstyle indication of gender. The child looked like a walking manikin with frizzy hair on its head. It appeared to be maybe five or six years old—I am not lying!—and it had a pacifier in its mouth. No word was ever said to it in my presence, and it never attempted to vocalize or otherwise communicate with anyone else. It just wandered out of the living room, across the dining room, and out the foyer opening, minding its own business, and a looking like it had somewhere to go and wanted to be. That’s not the weird part though. Here is the weird part. My visits at Stainy’s house were spread out over a period of six years, the first one and the second one separated by my three years in prison, yet I saw what appeared to be the same child, dressed the same way, with the same pacifier every single time that I was there. Explain that one to me if you can.

One more weird thing, and then I’m done. I believe it was during my third visit to the Stainy house, while the table talkers were paused watching a video, this gorgeous woman comes walking into the dining room. She’s tall, blonde, athletic looking. She’s got curves where they are supposed to be, and they are accentuated by a skin-tight black dress. She’s wearing high stiletto heels and a ton of goopy make-up. She walks up behind Stainy, puts her manicured hands with their red-painted fingernails up on his shoulders, and, like everyone else in the room, stares into the living room at the TV. When the MTV video ends, Stainy declares the pause over with his grating laugh, and she says something like this.

“I’m goin’ out dancin’ for a while.”

“Where ya goin’?”

That’s Stainy responding to her.

“BJ’s first…see whose there.”

“Who ya goin with?”

“Friends.”

“What friends? You ain’t got no friends.”

“Tiffany, Brittany…”

“The slut brigade?”

“You like’em just fine when they’re all over you.”

“Ke! Ke! Ke! Ke! ...You comin’ home tonight?”

“Not if I find somebody interesting.”

“Make sure your kid’s fed before you go then.”

He didn’t laugh at the end of that.

The woman walked by me into the foyer, a looking down her nose at me like I was a dog turd as she passed. I could see the cellulite on her legs and ass when she got close, so she really wasn’t any hot stuff. Anyhow, her heels clicked on the hardwood floor as she walked the few steps to the front door, and then she slammed it shut with enough force to shake the nook window. Two minutes later, tires squealed as she tore out of the driveway in Stainy’s 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.

Oops! That is one more thing that Enos Taney was known for besides being a dirty drug dealer with an annoying laugh. He had two fine, fine vehicles. Most of the time, he drove a 1974 Chevy Blazer. It was tricked out and jacked up. It had a lift kit that put its floorboard about waist-high on an average person, and it had big balloon-like knobby tires. Of course, it was a four-wheel drive. Stainy called it his “Puddle Jumper,” I reckon because he would spend weekends running it through creeks and swamps, seeing if he could get it stuck. I don’t suppose he ever did, but I don’t know because I never went with him. The inside was stripped down to the metal on the floor board, and it had bench seats in the front and back with twelve inch legs lifting them up off the floor. It didn’t have any cloth or wood in it I imagine because it got wet and muddy in there every time he went a muddin’. I really don’t remember much else. The only time I ever rode in that yellow Blazer was when we made the deal at the rest area of I-40 that day. Yep! That’s it.

Oh…and Stainy’s other vehicle that I mentioned briefly above was the iconic 1977 Pontiac Trans Am. It was identical to the car that Burt Reynolds drove in the first Smokey and the Bandit movie, IDENTICAL, so I don’t have to describe it to you. You can go watch the movie or look it up on YouTube. I seem to be directing y’all to YouTube an awful lot. Does the make me a “Tech Native?” It sure was a cool car. It was the car we were in when I got arrested, and I am gonna get to that part. I promise!

Anyhow, I’m at the bottom of six pages. I reckon now you know all that you ever need to know about Enos Taney. Next chapter, we get back to the business. Six pages, Ardell! And I made the font bigger so it’s fewer words!

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I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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